Bear essentials
Despite a ban on bear baiting in Pakistan, the sport continues to flourish
By Mohammad Niaz
The tribe of Kalandar (darvesh) thrives on bear baiting. After buying bears from traders, who buy the animal from the nomadic grazers, the Kalandars are often accused of inflicting invasive injuries on the bear: they extract incisors and canines and pierce their muzzle with a nose ring as a device to control them. Once this is done, the animals are trained to dance. But the training itself is gruesome -- cubs are made to stand on hot metal surface and are repeatedly beaten. The bear learns to dance in an attempt to avoid pain. Mostly cubs are preferred as they can be controlled and trained to dance with relative ease. The poachers often kill the mother bear protecting her cub.

Gallivanting around Rahim Yar Khan recently, I was told of two

stupas in the district. And so there I betook myself to the ancient holy places

By Salman Rashid

In reverence to Siddhartha, the Mahatma Buddha, the founder of their religion, Buddhist people build stupas. As repositories of Buddha's relics, these structures, half-domed and circular, serve as focal points for worship. Deep inside the drum of the structure, carefully placed there at the time of construction, is a tiny relic casket containing either a tooth or a nail clipping or hair supposedly from the Buddha's person. Some famous stupas are believed to contain the begging bowls used by the saint. Worship consists of circumambulation of the shrine.

The discovery of the stupas of Taxila and several sites in Pukhtunkhwa led most of us to believe that the stupa was native only to the north. But the most famous one in the south is the trademark stupa of Moen jo Daro. Indeed, John Marshall began his excavation with a view to investigating this ancient mound. What he found underneath was way beyond his belief.

There are other stupas in Sindh. The one is near Jacobabad outside Thul, a town that takes its name from the Sindhi word for stupa. The other lies off the Hyderabad-Badin highroad and goes by the name of Sudheran jo Thul after a mythical prince of Nerunkot as Hyderabad was anciently known. Experts date these two to just over two thousand years old.

Gallivanting around Rahim Yar Khan recently, I was told of two stupas in the district by my friend Raheal Siddiqui. And so there I betook myself to the ancient holy places.

Three kilometres north of the town of Allahabad on the highroad to Liaquatpur, Basti Sial is a small village in the heart of southern Punjab cotton country. The stupa sits amid tamarisk and ber trees surrounded by square patches of cultivation. A far cry from the stupas of, say, Swat or Taxila, this one is a misshapen, dust-coloured angular hump no more than four metres tall.

Like the Thul stupa of Jacobabad, the drum of this one in Basti Sial is square in shape. It is constructed of sun-dried bricks measuring 30x15x7.5 cms. Bricks of this size (and some even larger) were commonly used more than two thousand years ago from the deep south of Sindh up into northern Punjab.

The angular drum sits on a packed mud plinth whose brick facing, if there was any, has long since disappeared. Each side of the drum measures 7.3x7.3 metres and when it was complete may have been about ten metres high. The stupa does not appear to have been plundered because if there was a relic casket, it would be somewhere inside the drum which is undisturbed. Locals ascribe no superstition to the monument, nor do they recognise its significance. Since the Department of Archaeology is unconcerned and because of our national disregard for history, I fear, this stupa will by and by be swallowed up by agriculture.

Lalu wala Thul lies hard by the road leading from Khanpur northward to the village of Pucca Laran (the r is palatal and the n nasal). Like its sister stupa the drum of this one is also square in shape. Much larger than the other, it sits on a higher plinth which contains some kiln-fired bricks besides sun-dried ones. Unable to reach the bricks in order to measure them, I nevertheless think they measure the same as those used in the other one. In its heyday, this stupa must have been an impressive sight rising no less than some fifteen metres above the surrounding ground.

Chroniclers travelling with Alexander of Macedonia recorded Buddhism as a major religion in what is now Pakistan. Of course there were also Zoroastrians and Hindus -- this latter name having been coined in medieval times; we do not know what Hindus were known as back then. Although Buddhism suffered greatly at the hands of the savage Huns under Tor Aman and his son Mehr Gul in the latter part of the 5th century, it endured and was the religion of the masses at the time of the Arab conquest of Sindh.

And so, as the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim marched north to Multan, they must have passed by Lalu wala Thul and the Basti Sial stupa. Even at that time these monuments were well over a thousand years old. On the other hand, Alexander passing through here in the autumn of the year 326 BCE saw them prim and new, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred years old.

None of the Greeks with Alexander comment on the religion of this particular area. But we do know that the people who barred Alexander's southward journey through Rahim Yar Khan are called Sogdians in the chronicles. Now, Sogdia was the country lying north of the Oxus River, that is, the modern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and its people were the Sogdians. But even so there is no discrepancy.

South Punjab and Sindh were home to the Rajput clan of Sodha which name was corrupted to Sogdian by the Greeks. The battle against them was hard-fought but after defeating them Alexander, being what he was, did not destroy their holy sites. We know that rather than being antagonistic towards the many religions he came across on his conquests, Alexander readily performed their rites. Indeed, his lack of bias comes across clearly when he was grieved to see the damage inflicted by grave robbers to the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Now, Cyrus was the king who consolidated the Achaemenian Empire more than two hundred years before Alexander set out to dismantle it. In the same vein, the two stupas and the accompanying schools would have been permitted to function unmolested.

Mohammad bin Qasim was no molester either. And so the stupas of Rahim Yar Khan may have thrummed with piety and worship well into the 10th century. By then Buddhism, which had gone into decline with the Hunnic attacks, was replaced by Hinduism and Islam. Slowly the sound of chanted prayers reverberating off the bricks of the stupas dimmed and eventually died.

They were left to the vagaries of nature. Very likely man moved in to help himself to the baked bricks facing the monuments. Erosion quickened until we are left with the stubs of once glorious religious buildings. Thankfully the area has scant precipitation or even these mud structures would have long since been lost. Who knows how much longer these milestones to the distant past will yet endure.

The tribe of Kalandar (darvesh) thrives on bear baiting. After buying bears from traders, who buy the animal from the nomadic grazers, the Kalandars are often accused of inflicting invasive injuries on the bear: they extract incisors and canines and pierce their muzzle with a nose ring as a device to control them. Once this is done, the animals are trained to dance. But the training itself is gruesome -- cubs are made to stand on hot metal surface and are repeatedly beaten. The bear learns to dance in an attempt to avoid pain. Mostly cubs are preferred as they can be controlled and trained to dance with relative ease. The poachers often kill the mother bear protecting her cub.

Kalandars not only rear the bears under unhygienic conditions but also keep them under nourished. Interestingly, every bear is assigned a named.

The persecution of bear cubs for use in bear baiting and for street dancing is threatening the bear population in Pakistan. Hundreds of bear cubs are reportedly captured every year for this purpose. Bears are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. They are endangered due to habitat degradation, killing of bears in defence of livestock and crop, and for bear parts being used in traditional medicines.

Pakistan's geographical location helps sustain two species of bears -- black and brown bear. There are two recognised sub-species of black bear, the Himalayan black bear and Balochistan black bear. The brown bear and the Himalayan black bear inhabit high mountain region of NWFP, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and other northern areas. Himalayan black bear is confined to Himalayan moist and dry temperate forest and adjoining sub-alpine scrub. The brown bear lives in drier sub-alpine and alpine meadows of the cold desert region -- the highest concentration is found on the Deosai plains. Balochistan black bear has a limited presence in Balochistan.

The capture of bear cubs is prohibited at provincial level through the North West Frontier Province Protection, Preservation, Conservation, and Management Act (1975); the Punjab Wildlife Protection, Preservation, Conservation and Management Act (1974); and the Sindh Wildlife Protection Ordinance (1972). Bear baiting is illegal under section 3 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1890, which makes cruelty to animals punishable with imprisonment and fine or both as the case may be. There is also legal coverage for harassing an animal under the Pakistan Penal Code 1860 (section 429). But the existing enactment is ineffective at large.

Originating from England, bear baiting became popular in the 16th century and was introduced to the sub-continent in the colonial era. With the arrival of British, bull terriers were brought along and the gypsies were incited to use their bears for fighting the dogs, thus promoting a new sport in the rural areas of the region. The new sport was supported by the feudal landlords of Punjab and Sindh to earn favours of the British rulers. It soon became their hobby, and a popular event held in winter and spring. The event is regularly organised in modern days as well, and is attended by thousands of spectators that gather to witness the brutal fight of trained dogs with tethered and clawless bear in an arena. After several rounds of fighting if the bear remains upright it is declared victorious, though severe injuries are inflicted on both the dog and the bear.

To rescue the animal from cruelty, the international animal welfare organisations became very active in late 1980s, and launched a campaign to protect the animal from such savagery. Ultimately, the Pakistan government took notice of the issue and imposed a ban on bear baiting in early 1990s.

Being cautious of these facts, the NWFP Wildlife Department with assistance of World Society for Protection of Animals (WSPA) worked for establishing the first ever bear centre sanctuary of Pakistan at Kund in NWFP where bears confiscated from bear baiting events and poachers could be housed for treatment and rehabilitation. Established in 2001, spread over 12 acres near the confluence of River Indus and River Kabul in NWFP, Kund Sanctuary in Nowshera provides semi-natural conditions in captive ex-situ conservation setting to such crippled bears under proper medicare and nutritious feed.

Managed by the Pakistan Bioresource Research Centre, the Kund Sanctuary currently houses 24 bears. It also serves as a nucleus to disseminate conservation education and awareness among masses. Another similar bear sanctuary is being established at Kalar Kahar in Punjab.

The conservation of bears faces other problems too, such as limited funds, strict laws, rules and penalties. More importantly, Kalandars must be provided with other livelihood options than bear baiting; after all, bears are our national asset and some species are specific to Pakistan only.